Heads In The (Tar) Sands

This is a follow-up post on common sense evidence that easily accessible crude oil is in depletion and its relationship to debt and central bank policies.

I just watched a TV documentary about the Alberta tar sands and the way oil is mined by Syncrude. Some facts:

• The teeth of the giant shovels that scoop up the tar sands have to be replaced every 12 hours. That's a lot of steel to chew through in half a day - it surely isn't beach sand...
  

Photo: Graig Smith

• Imagine rubbing #40 sandpaper on your skin. Now guess what happens to every pipe, vessel, pump and valve that handles the tar sand slurry. The company has two separate process trains working in parallel, switching from one to the other in order to constantly replace worn parts.

• The giant 400-ton trucks that carry the sands cost $6 million. Their 3,550 HP engines have to be replaced every two years, at $1+ million a pop. Tires cost $60,000 - each.
  

When it comes to evaluating resource depletion, deeds speak louder than words. Oil isn't available for the price of a straw stuck in the sand any more. Back when "gushers" were common, easily accessible crude had EROEI of as much as 100-to-1. Saudi crude is now extracted at 10-to-1 and tar sand oil at 5-to-1. We can argue dollar prices forever, but a kilowatt is always a kilowatt. Try this simple thought experiment: instead of thinking of oil prices in dollars per barrel, reverse the point of view and think in terms of barrels per dollar. That is, price the artificial entity (dollars) in terms of the real item (oil). Do you see the difference?

As I see it, our global human society has two choices. We can keep our heads buried in the (tar) sands, perma-consuming until all we have left to bequeath our children are dregs. Or we can stop right now and start moving towards a sustainable regime. The current debt "crisis" is not only a warning sign that we have already consumed too much of our future. It is also a golden opportunity to reverse some of the excess, to un-mortgage humanity's future by letting some of the debt go bust.

In this sense, repeated bailouts by central banks (BOE is the latest addition) are profoundly wrong, misbegotten and ultimately dangerous. Speaking in thermodynamic terms, they are trying to convince us that their kilowatt is worth more than one kilowatt. They are just drilling their heads deeper into the sand, forcing us along for the ride. Unfortunately, we will have to work that much harder to dig ourselves out - assuming we will still have some food left over.

_____________________________________

Note: A reader asked for a book recommendation on Thermoeconomics: Try "The Entropy Law and The Economic Process". It's now on the Amazon bar on the right.